The invention relates generally to personalization of web content, as well as to a content personalization engine.
Web portals, or simply portals, pioneered as one of the earliest adopters of adaptation and personalization techniques to help users deal with the problem of information overload. Nowadays, a large number of organizations use them as a single point of access to the vast amount of resources available on the Web and in enterprise intranets. Some organizations strive to make portals adaptive to the users and the context they work in, so that the users may be provided with the right information at the right time. There may be different kinds of adaptation effects the users might encounter in an adaptive portal, e.g., the portal's front page displaying recently added resources comprising the information that a user is interested in, modifying navigation topology to promote interesting pages to better positions, augmenting portal content with additional information that may match a user's current interests, and so on.
In order to achieve such adaptation effects, the following four requirements may be met. First, the portal may comprise a user model containing information about users, e.g., their interests, expertise, traits, goals, and so on. Secondly, the portal's resources may be described with metadata representing machine-processable semantics of the content. Thirdly, to achieve automatic selection of the resources that may match a user's individual needs, both user model and metadata may use the same vocabulary, which may require a domain knowledge model represented in a formalism that may be interpreted by the portal. Fourthly, the portal may need personalization rules governing what adaptation effects should be made for a certain user, when, and how.
In today's adaptive portals, users may see only the final adaptation effects. The mechanism of the adaptation process, user and domain knowledge models, and personalization rules are hidden from the user. This, however, results in a number of grave usability and privacy problems and may cause incompleteness and incorrectness of the system information being used for the adaptation. Firstly, users do not understand how the personalization works, e.g., why they get recommendations to certain resources. Secondly, users may have a very limited control on personalization, which may lead to wrong personalization effects. For instance, if the user cannot view and modify data of his own user model, she or he may not be able to notice and correct wrong assumptions that the system may make about her or his interests. This may result in receiving recommendations to irrelevant content and/or not recommending relevant content.
Several approaches have been followed in order to deal with a portal personalization. Document U.S. Pat. No. 7,349,949B1 discloses systems and methods for facilitating development of a customizable portlet. The disclosure comprises receiving requested content information, merging presentation information with the requested content information to form merged information, and rendering the merged information in the customizable portlet. The methods require a master builder.
Document US2009/0064004B2 discloses a method for configuring portlets. In one embodiment, a method of automatically configuring a portlet is provided. The method includes: receiving a portlet; searching content of the portlet for a contextual aspect; and automatically applying attribute information to a portlet window object based on a discovered contextual aspect.
Document US2006/0047777A1 discloses a method, system, and apparatus for enhancing the run-time display of a portlet using dynamically applied portlet skins. The system can include a portlet aggregator configured to aggregate portlet views into a portal page, and alternate skin insertion logic programmed to wrap at least one portlet view with an alternate skin in lieu of a static skin. A portlet filter can be communicatively coupled to the portlet aggregator and configured to manage the alternate skin insertion logic.
However, because of the limitations of the technology of the state of the art, there may be a requirement for an improved mechanism for interacting with portals, in particular a way to better control functionality of portlets in a portal.